The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding

326 Pages·2007·0.22 MB·English

by  Mark Johnson

The following works are reprinted with permission:
“Purity,” from Questions about Angels, by Billy Collins, © 1999. Reprinted by permission of the University of
Pittsburgh Press and by permission of the author.
“since feeling is first.” Copyright 1926, 1954, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright
© 1985 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems, 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J.
Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
“You Reading This, Be Ready.” Copyright 1998 by the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted from The Way It
Is: New & Selected Poems, with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
“The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams. From Collected Poems, 1909–39, vol. 1, copyright ©
1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. William
Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, Carcanet Press Limited, 2000.
Pablo Neruda, “Gentleman without Company.” Reprinted from Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, Beacon
Press, Boston, 1993. Copyright 1993 Robert Bly. Used with his permission.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2007 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2007
Paperback edition 2008
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40192-8 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40193-5 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-40192-8 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-40193-6 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02699-2 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Mark, 1949–
The meaning of the body : aesthetics of human understanding / Mark Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40192-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-40192-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Meaning (Philosophy). 2. Body, Human (Philosophy) 3. Aesthetics. I. Title.
B105.M4.J65 2007
121'.68—dc22
206100532
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
MARK JOHNSON
The Meaning of the Body
AESTHETICS OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
FOR MY CHILDREN:
Paul, who is joyful and kind of heart, and
Sarah, who has a poet’s imagination
CONTENTS

Preface: The Need for an Aesthetics of Human Meaning
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Meaning Is More Than Words and Deeper Than Concepts

PART I: Bodily Meaning and Felt Sense
1. The Movement of Life
2. Big Babies
3. “Since Feeling Is First”: Emotional Dimensions of Meaning
4. The Grounding of Meaning in the Qualities of Life
5. Feeling William James’s “But”: The Aesthetics of Reasoning and Logic
PART II: Embodied Meaning and the Sciences of Mind
6. The Origin of Meaning in Organism-Environment Coupling: A
Nonrepresentational View of Mind
7. The Corporeal Roots of Symbolic Meaning
8. The Brain’s Role in Meaning
9. From Embodied Meaning to Abstract Thought
PART III: Embodied Meaning, Aesthetics, and Art
10. Art as an Exemplar of Meaning-Making
11. Music and the Flow of Meaning
12. The Meaning of the Body
Notes
References
Index
Color plates
PREFACE
The Need for an Aesthetics of Human Meaning

People want their lives to be meaningful. This desire—this eros—for meaning is so
strong in us that we are sometimes even willing to risk death in our pursuit of meaning
and fulfillment. It is our need to make sense of our experience and to inquire into its
overall meaning and significance that has kept philosophy alive since the dawn of
reflective thinking in our species. When philosophy ceases to further our quest for
meaning—when it stops addressing the recurring problems that define the human
condition—it loses its relevance to human existence.
Unfortunately, meaning is a big, messy, multidimensional concept that is applied to
everything from grandiose notions like the meaning of life all the way down to the
specific meanings of single words or even morphemes. This book is about meaning—
what it is, where it comes from, and how it is made. The guiding theme is that meaning
grows from our visceral connections to life and the bodily conditions of life. We are
born into the world as creatures of the flesh, and it is through our bodily perceptions,
movements, emotions, and feelings that meaning becomes possible and takes the forms
it does. From the day we are brought kicking and screaming into the world, what and
how anything is meaningful to us is shaped by our specific form of incarnation.
My work over the past three decades has focused primarily on the bodily sources of
meaning, imagination, and reasoning. I drew from phenomenology, linguistics, and the
newly emerging cognitive sciences to explain how aspects of our bodily experience
give rise to our conceptualization and reasoning. However, I have come to realize that,
even though I then regarded these earlier efforts as revealing the very heart of human
meaning-making, nevertheless, I had not grasped the deepest and most profound bodily
sources of meaning. In retrospect, I now see that the structural aspects of our bodily
interactions with our environment upon which I was focusing were themselves
dependent on even more submerged dimensions of bodily understanding. It was an
important step to probe below concepts, propositions, and sentences into the
sensorimotor processes by which we understand our world, but what is now needed is a
far deeper exploration into the qualities, feelings, emotions, and bodily processes that
make meaning possible.
Once I took the leap into these deep, visceral origins of meaning, I soon realized that
I was dealing with aspects of experience traditionally regarded as the purview of
aesthetics. If this was true, then aesthetics must not be narrowly construed as the study
of art and so-called aesthetic experience. Instead, aesthetics becomes the study of
everything that goes into the human capacity to make and experience meaning. This
entailed that an aesthetics of human understanding should become the basis for all
philosophy, including metaphysics, theory of knowledge, logic, philosophy of mind and
language, and value theory.
There is a rich tradition in American philosophy, culminating in the work of the
pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, which gives pride of place to aesthetics.
Unfortunately, most Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century ignored or
even rejected this pragmatist tradition. What followed was an analytic philosophy built
on the marginalizing of aesthetics and the championing of a narrow view of meaning as
conceptual and propositional in character.
I contend that this mainstream, and still dominant, tradition has only the most meager
resources for dealing with the deepest sources of human meaning. Consequently, much
contemporary philosophy focuses exclusively on abstract conceptual and propositional
structure, leaving us with a very superficial and eviscerated view of mind, thought, and
language. These philosophers have developed elaborate conceptual schemes for
identifying the so-called cognitive, structural, and formal aspects of experience,
thought, and language, but they lack adequate philosophical resources to plumb the
depths of the qualitative feeling dimensions of experience and meaning. Although some
phenomenological traditions do address these affective dimensions, phenomenology has
been marginalized within mainstream Anglo-American philosophy and has
consequently not had the salutary influence on our conception of human understanding
that it deserves.
However, there is good news. In the past few years the cognitive neurosciences have
begun to entice even hardcore analytic philosophers of mind and language to pay more
attention to the vast, submerged continents of nonconscious thought and feeling that lie
at the heart of our ability to make sense of our lives. A major part of what I have to say
in this book about the nature of meaning and thinking draws on some of these recent
developments in the new sciences of embodied mind. I attempt to blend work from
cognitive science with traditional phenomenological description, in order to provide an
enriched view of human meaning-making.
I will argue that the chief reason that certain philosophers neglect notions like quality,
emotion, and feeling is their mistaken view of these as nothing but subjective mental
states that are “merely aesthetic” matters of subjective judgment and taste. There is
today still a pervasive cultural misunderstanding of, and consequent prejudice against,
aesthetics. When the arts are misconceived as a minor, nonpractical, wholly subjective
dimension of human life, aesthetics becomes merely a tertiary enterprise having little
perceived relevance to the nature of mind and cognition. This “subjectivization of the
aesthetic” (as Hans-Georg Gadamer calls it) has led to a number of unfortunate
consequences, both for our lives and for our philosophies of meaning and value. Chief
among these harmful misconceptions are that (1) the mind is disembodied, (2) thinking
transcends feeling, (3) feelings are not part of meaning and knowledge, (4) aesthetics
concerns matters of mere subjective taste, and (5) the arts are a luxury (rather than
being conditions of full human flourishing).
Following Dewey, I want to turn these misconceptions on their head by showing that
aesthetics must become the basis of any profound understanding of meaning and
thought. Aesthetics is properly an investigation of everything that goes into human
meaning-making, and its traditional focus on the arts stems primarily from the fact that
arts are exemplary cases of consummated meaning. However, any adequate aesthetics
of cognition must range far beyond the arts proper to explore how meaning is possible
for creatures with our types of bodies, environments, and cultural institutions and
practices.
In short, this book is about the bodily depths of human meaning-making through our
visceral connection to our world. It will become clear as my account develops that I am
using the term “meaning” in its broadest and most profound sense. I am going to argue
that meaning is not just a matter of concepts and propositions, but also reaches down
into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions that constitute
our meaningful encounter with our world. Any adequate account of meaning must be
built around the aesthetic dimensions that give our experience its distinctive character
and significance. A philosophy capable of making a difference for how people ought to
live must be grounded on how we make sense of things. What we need, in short, is an
aesthetics of human understanding. This is a big, sweeping task, but one well worth the
journey for anyone who cares about what it means to be human.
I have organized my exploration into three major sections. Part 1 (“Bodily Meaning
and Felt Sense”) attempts to provide a thick description of the bodily origins of
meaning in sensorimotor processes and in feelings. We have to start deep down in the
bodily processes where meaning emerges, lives, and grows. My emphasis is on qualities
and structures of embodied meaning in movement, infant and childhood development,
emotions, and conceptualization and reasoning. My descriptions of the richness and
depth of bodily meaning are intended to remind us how meaning arises before we are
even aware of it and how that preconscious meaning underlies our higher-level
achievements of thinking and communicating.
Part 2 (“Embodied Meaning and the Sciences of Mind”) draws on cognitive science
and neuroscience to probe the bodily roots of meaning, concepts, and language. This
section is necessarily highly selective and partial. I locate human cognition within a
broader evolutionary framework of animal cognition, in which sensorimotor capacities
play a key role in how any animal experiences and makes sense of its world. Our
connection to nonhuman animals reveals that what is known as the representational
theory of mind, according to which the mind supposedly operates on internal mental
representations of external states, is highly problematic, if not downright false. If mind
and body are not two separate and distinct ontological kinds, then thought must emerge
via recruitment of various sensorimotor capacities that do not involve internal
representations. I therefore reject the classical representational theory of mind,
replacing it with an account of embodied meaning that emerges as structures of
organism-environment interactions or transactions. I also propose some plausible
neurophysiological structures that might underlie the feelings, emotions, images,
concepts, and patterns of reasoning that make up human experience and understanding.
Part 3 (“Embodied Meaning, Aesthetics, and Art”) argues that various arts make use
of the very same structures and processes that operate in ordinary, everyday meaning-
making, including images, image schemas, metaphors, qualities, feelings, and emotions.
As John Dewey argued seventy years ago in Art as Experience, art is not a distinct type
of disinterested, nonpractical experience that requires unique forms of judgment and
evaluation. On the contrary, art matters because it provides heightened, intensified, and
highly integrated experiences of meaning, using all of our ordinary resources for
meaning-making. If this is true, then we can find no better examples of how meaning
happens than by attending to the arts. I examine some aspects of meaning in poetry,
painting, and music. I am led to embrace Dewey’s insistence that the arts are important
just insofar as they help us grasp, criticize, and transform meanings and values. I end by
summarizing the view of meaning, thought, and language that arises from my
exploration of embodied meaning, suggesting that philosophy will matter to people only
to the extent that it is built on a visceral connection to our world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two decades ago, Tom Alexander introduced me to John Dewey’s important insight
that it is primarily in the aesthetic dimensions of experience that we encounter
consummated human meaning. Tom opened my eyes to the felt qualitative unity of
situations, beneath the level of propositional and sentential structure, that gives rise to
meaning and thought. This book explores that profound idea, as well as Dewey’s
nondualistic view of the embodied mind.
I realized that to probe the depths of meaning, no single approach or method alone
could tell the whole story. I had to employ a plurality of methods, from classical
American pragmatism to phenomenology to cognitive science. From the pragmatist
tradition, I have benefited most from the writings of William James and John Dewey,
about whom I have learned most of what I know from ongoing conversations with
scores of members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. I value
that society because it provides a supportive atmosphere that encourages an open,
pluralistic discussion of real-life problems. In phenomenology, I resonate most deeply
with the body-based approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I have learned a great
deal about his philosophy from conversation with and reading phenomenologists such
as Franciso Varela, Shaun Gallagher, David Levin, Eugene Gendlin, and my University
of Oregon colleagues Beata Stawarska, John Lysaker, and Louise Westling. On the side
of cognitive science, I am indebted to ongoing dialogue with my dear friend George
Lakoff, who first introduced me to the importance of cognitive neuroscience for
understanding mind, thought, and language. I have also benefited immensely from the
writings of Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Vittorio
Gallese, and my colleague Don Tucker, all of whom have created a dialogue between
philosophy and the empirical research of the sciences of the mind.
Several people provided crucial feedback on my manuscript, especially Shaun
Gallagher, Tim Rohrer, and Steve Larson, each of whom read the entire work and gave
detailed criticisms and suggestions for improvement. My gratitude toward them is
heartfelt and considerable. Scott Pratt and Don Tucker read and commented on parts of
the manuscript, providing many important suggestions. For several years now, Scott has
proved himself a most valuable interlocutor in our ongoing explorations of some of the
key themes in this book. I have learned much from him about American pragmatism by
auditing his seminars and by discussing our mutual interests, especially on our trout-
fishing expeditions in the Cascade mountains. I want to express my deep gratitude to
Nancy Trotic for her meticulous editorial work on this book. It was my good fortune to
have an editor who understood my project and took remarkable care in helping me
express myself more clearly, concisely, and elegantly than in my earlier drafts. I found
Nancy to be a force of nature. She overwhelmed me with constructive suggestions for
improving my arguments and giving proper attention to every detail. I cannot thank her
enough.